WASHINGTON (AP) — Apple Inc., which makes the iPhone, iPad and other consumer electronics, spent $560,000 lobbying the federal government on green technology, technology spending for education and other issues in the first quarter, according to a quarterly disclosure report.

Apple has replaced many of the hazardous materials in its gadgets with less harmful and more recyclable ones, and designed the A4 processing chip in its iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch to be energy efficient. It has also designed proprietary longer-life batteries for its computers, media players and phones.

In addition to the House, Senate, and EPA, Apple lobbied the Department of Education, Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies during the first three months of the year, according to the disclosure report filed with the House clerk’s office on April 20.

First I slightly disagree with Apple thinking they are “so far ahead” but they bit of time they have spent ahead of the pack is probably because they are committing vertical monopoly crimes. The article states:

What Apple does is use its cash hoard to pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of the factory in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time (maybe 6 – 36 months), and then for a discounted rate afterwards. This yields two advantages:

1. Apple has access to new component technology months or years before its rivals. This allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate…

2. Eventually its competitors catch up in component production technology, but by then Apple has their arrangement in place whereby it can source those parts at a lower cost due to the discounted rate they have negotiated with the (now) most-experienced and skilled provider of those parts – who has probably also brought his production costs down too…

Gizmodo probably doesn’t even realize what they have discovered with this information, but if Apple is truly doing this in the technology supply industry, they are in violation of monopoly laws that prevent specifically this type of action. It is called a vertical monopoly. Most people only understand monopolies as a horizontal. This mean that one company controls all of the available supply of a certain product, thus having complete control over the price of such a product and making the market non competitive.

However vertical monopolies are also illegal. A perfect example of a vertical monopoly is the steel industry in the USA during the beginning of the industrial revolution. One company (US Steel) owned the mines, the rail road used to transfer the materials, and the refineries to process the raw materials into steel. This allowed US Steel to control the supply of raw materials and limit the availability of them to other refineries thus allowing them to control the market price of steel. This is also exactly what apple is doing by restricting the release of other companies technologies to all companies in the industry.

Which is probably just a small portion of why Apple is spending so much money lobbying on capital hill.